'politics' Category
From Stewards to Shareholders
A small item in the paper earlier this week quietly announced the death of Chief Marie Smith Jones, the last native speaker of the Eyak language. Eyak is one of nearly 20 Alaskan Native languages, and the first to become extinct.
Jones was chief of the Eyak Nation, a people whose ancestral homeland runs along [...]Grace Lee Boggs
Grace Lee Boggs on King’s Legacy of Change:
In the last three years of his life, confronted by the catastrophe of the Vietnam War and urban rebellions, King recognized that “the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit. We are on the wrong side of a [...]The Larger Question
Gerald Bracey asks 3 questions that might interest education technology bloggers.
The first two:
The immediate questions that come to mind — or certainly should come to mind — are “What constitutes a 21st century skill?” and then “Who gets to define such a skill?” The answer to the first question is “nobody knows” and the answer [...]Limitations
It’s getting dark here. Not just kind of dark. But real winter-dark. As in, I took a picture of the sunset yesterday at 3:00 while everyone was getting their coats on to leave school.
Strangely, it’s not real cold yet, and we’ve only got just a lousy couple inches of leaf-covered snow in the [...]Herd Poisoning
Graham Wegner points out some problems that cropped up in the comments of a couple of education blogs. He comments on the perils of taking up heartfelt issues in blog comments, and assuming we’ll be understood.
Neil Postman’s Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk has an excerpted chapter, Propaganda [pdf], in which he argues that propaganda [...]Considering the Source in Reading Programs
Tom Hoffman writes about a model for developing open source K-12 curriculum. He posted a link to the research base used in his example, and he offers a disclaimer:
…I’m not at all qualified to state whether this curriculum is actually any good or ideologically correct. There may be vast “Reading Wars” sub-texts here which are [...]Thick Description
We had parent conferences last week. They’re a time for me to learn more about my students, just as much as they give me a chance to report on their progress. For the parents who don’t make it to the meeting, I give them a call some time during the following week. But the phone [...]
This Explains Everything
Paul Krugman:
Some people seem to think that I’m saying that racism and the other issues I classify as “weapons of mass distraction” are what movement conservatism is about. They aren’t.
What the movement is about is economics: the core goal is, as Heritage says in its fundraising letters, to roll back the New Deal and the [...]Between Scylla and Charybdis
There are many other things I could be writing about. But I got sidetracked by teacherken:
I am angry. I despair. I am outraged. I am exhausted. I teach about a government that perhaps no longer exists, one that had three co-equal branches, that had checks and balances, in which the power [...]Are You Smarter than a Billionaire?
Clay Burell threw down a fun little quiz challenge yesterday, and I took it. My result said I’m smarter than 97.64% of the population (whoever that is) which, according to his preliminary results, puts me behind his 98.3% score, and Stephen Downes’ 98.98%. I left a comment asking, What does it mean to be smart? [...]
